Favorites of the week: The lightness of gesture – culture

Exhibition: “Primitive Future” at the Aedes Gallery

Some even fail to draw a house without lifting the pen. The Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has now managed to align his entire oeuvre in one go, including trees, people, animals: Basically, it’s a complete world that he creates as a 3D drawing with a single wire to the Berlin architecture gallery Aedes has hung. This is spectacular because of the apparent lightness of the gesture (until August 30). But one also gets the impression that gravity is somehow less strong in Japan in front of his literally magical buildings, often metamorphoses of houses, trees, bushes or mounds of earth. Because the continuous line is also a program, a return to the pre-modern feeling of connection between man and nature, but with dramatically modern means: romanticism in contemporary Japanese. Peter Richter

Architecture: Norman Foster’s Course for Children

Norman Foster discovered the children. That’s a good thing, because children grow into adults – and adult architects, mayors and urban planners can make this world a better place. worse too. So there is nothing wrong with investing in the skills of planners. But this also applies to those who live in the consequences of the plans. In offices, homes and cities. Participatory influence is increasingly being exerted on planning. In other words: Very many people design living space, very few people know how to do it. Which in turn explains a lot. The office of Foster + Partners offers now offer children a kind of holiday telecollege: “Build your own city”. Templates are put online on a weekly basis. This can be used to design hospitals, schools or even bridges. Of course, this is nothing more than an online handicraft course with paper and colored pencils – but the pictures give you an idea: children may wish for a different, more decorative, more colorful and fantastically designed world. As an adult, you can relate to that. children in power. Gerhard Matzig

Jewish Life: Menorah Center in Dnipro

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Anyone stopping by Dnipro in the near future…well, there won’t be many, Dnipro is in eastern Ukraine, 110 kilometers from the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. So let’s put it this way: If you stop by Dnipro at some point, you should, no, have to visit the menorah center. 20 floors, seven towers, inspired by the seven-armed chandelier, which protectively embrace the Golden Rose Synagogue: Not in Lviv, not in Odessa, but in Dnipro is the largest Jewish cultural and business center in the world with banks, a hotel and a hummus Bar, with a museum of Jewish history and Holocaust in Ukraine, with the supermarket “Kosher Deluxe” and a branch of David Roytman’s exquisite “Luxury Judaica”. The marble corridors are currently rather empty, the war has also affected the Jewish community. And yet the complex is a proud expression of a rebirth of Jewish life in a place just as terrible but far less known for the horrors of the Holocaust than Babyn Jar.

On two days in October 1941 alone, the German police battalion 314 and Ukrainian auxiliary police officers under the direction of the SS shot 12,000 people. In October 1941 the Wehrmacht reported that the “Jewish question” had basically been “solved”. It was the annihilation of a Jewish community that was among the largest on modern-day Ukraine soil. In 1926 a third of the population was Jewish, in 1913 there were more than 80 prayer rooms and synagogues in the city. Dnipro, which was founded by Catherine the Great as Ekaterinoslav, and which was called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 to 2016 – unpronounceable for Western tongues – had experienced anti-Semitism and expulsion under Soviet rule before and after.

The resurgence is now all the more brilliant – even if the financiers of the Menorah Center include the highly controversial billionaire Ihor Kolomojskyj. Kolomojskyj owns influential television stations, is regarded as the kingmaker of President Volodymyr Zelenskij and is under strong suspicion of corruption. Zelensky has long since distanced himself from his former sponsor, and whatever happens to Kolomoysky, the Jewish community will survive this too. Sonja Zekri

Essay: “The Problem of Nature Writing”

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For a few decades, nature writing as a unironically naïve enthusiasm was thoroughly out of fashion, but since climate change has reached its acute stage, the production of Eduard Mörike-esque nature apotheoses has picked up noticeably again. The pattern – to be found, for example, in JA Baker, Robert Macfarlane and Esther Kinsky – usually looks like this: A narrator, tired of civilization, enters an untouched landscape and observes the roots, falcons and layers of sediment in a detailed and attentive manner until he, as it were, become one with them. The popularity of this form is inversely proportional to the state of nature itself: the fewer pristine areas there are on the planet, the more there are in publishing programs.

In a readable foreword to an American anthology of stories about birds, the famous bird watcher Jonathan Franzen, that also in new Yorker has appeared, raised some objections to this branch of nature writing. First problem, according to Franzen: The long, detailed landscape descriptions are unfortunately unbearable. Or at least no better than just looking at nature for yourself. Since the arrival of color photography and sound recording, long descriptions have been problematic in all genres of text, writes Franzen, but especially for a nature writer whose goal is to ignite in his audience the same enthusiasm for nature that he feels himself.

Because, second problem: Enthusiasm is always created through personal relationships. His experience with bird enthusiasts showed that 90 percent of them got their passion from another bird enthusiast with whom they had a close personal relationship: a father, a friend, a teacher. Therefore, in order to reach readers “who are totally wrapped up in their humanity” and impervious to the world of nature, it is not enough simply to portray one’s own love of nature. The text must also reflect the intensity of human relationships. You can’t force a reader to be interested in nature, says Franzen, “all we can do is tell powerful stories about people who are interested in nature and hope that this interest is contagious”. Felix Stephen

Classic: Pietro Antonio Locatelli

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In the phalanx of Italian violinists of the 18th century, Pietro Locatelli, born in Bergamo in 1695 and died in Amsterdam in 1764, stands out as a highly original virtuoso. At the age of 34 he retired from concert life and only played in private circles in Amsterdam. He collects a library with writings on music theory, natural sciences, literature and mathematics. He probably met Arcangelo Corelli in Rome. Locatelli’s violin concertos are a must for every student, his 24 Capricci are just as extreme as those of Niccolò Paganini, he loved the highest pitches on the violin. The concerti grossi are rich in surprises and fine cantabile. Isabelle Faust and Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini play so captivatingly beautiful and witty that one becomes addicted to his music. Harold Eggebrecht